8.5 Invoking columns

This program was designed for the purpose of generating compact, columnized tables. It will read a list of text items from standard in or a specified input file and produce a columnized listing of all the non-blank lines. Leading white space on each line is preserved, but trailing white space is stripped. Methods of applying per-entry and per-line embellishments are provided. See the formatting and separation arguments below.

This program is used by AutoGen to help clean up and organize its output.

See ‘autogen/agen5/fsm.tpl’ and the generated output ‘pseudo-fsm.h’.

This function was not implemented as an expression function because either it would have to be many expression functions, or a provision would have to be added to provide options to expression functions. Maybe not a bad idea, but it is not being implemented at the moment.

A side benefit is that you can use it outside of autogen to columnize input, a la the ls command.

This section was generated by AutoGen, using the agtexi-cmd template and the option descriptions for the columns program. This software is released under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later.

This document was generated by Bruce Korb on August 21, 2015 using texi2html 1.82.